One of the coolest things to come to SQL Server Management Studio in a long time might be hard to see at first: it’s tucked away in the Properties Window.
But once you see it, it might just be something that you use all the time.
I like SQL Server’s new Live Query Statistics feature a lot for testing and tuning large queries. One of my first questions was whether this could replace using actual execution plans, or if it’s useful to use both during testing.
Finding: Both are useful. And both can impact query performance.
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